What a Geologist Sees When They Look at Perseverance’s Landing Site

Universe Today ^ | 2/25/2021 | Evan Gough

[BipolarBob]

That looks just like the Utah desert.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

It’s all faked - just like the Lunar Landing. Hollywood can’t put out any decent movies, so it’s turned to fooling The General Public with this...

That said, this is so amazingly COOL! Sad that life on another planet is less TRAGIC than it is on Earth these days. :(

[minnesota_bound]

Looks like green cheese.

[LibWhacker]

My hero. Buzz Aldrin, 72 years old, slugs moon landing denier. :-)

[Ros42]

That’s really neat!

[seowulf]

I know I’m being a nit picker here, but if it’s on Mars, it’s not geology.

Aresology maybe.

[xp38]

Just don’t let Howard Wolowitz get near the controls.

[Chainmail]

According to what has been put out by NASA, the primary reason for this mission is to "search for evidence of life" that supposedly previously existed on Mars.

Why? Is it so important to these scientists that life be proven to be so ubiquitous and happenstance that it can spontaneously occur anywhere?

If they can't find any real traces of this life, what's the secondary mission for this very expensive rover?

Will at least some of these scientists finally realize how rare and not accidental life really is?

[hanamizu]

I know I’m being a nit picker here, but if it’s on Mars, it’s not geology.

---

I remember when we were going to the moon (Remember when we could do that, kids?), NASA were careful to say “perilune and apolune” instead of perigee and apogee”.

[seowulf]

The good old days, when words meant things...

[zeestephen]

As far as I know, Mars has never had plate tectonics.

Does that mean it is theoretically possible that 4.5 billion year old rocks are just lying around on the surface waiting to be picked up?

[PIF]

Will at least some of these scientists finally realize how rare and not accidental life really is?

—
Who told you? Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

[Chainmail]

"Who told you? Absence of proof is not proof of absence."

I see. So if this multi-Billion dollar boondoggle scoots around, sniffing and drilling and finds nothing - it just means that "it didn't search in the right place" or "it didn't drill deep enough"?

Or is it more likely that just having water and throwing a few minerals around won't "generate" life?

Idiots still can't face the very real probability that life showed up here on Earth and nowhere else.

[PIF]

So in our Universe there are trillions of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars, each star having at least one planet, but only on a small planet in an insignificant galaxy located on a backwater arm of that galaxy is there life on that planet and only that one? Can you do the math here: Every solar system has at least one planet; there are 100,000,000,000-400,000,000,000 stars in the Milky Way; how many planets is that?

Have you ever looked at the odds of your very limited proposition? And you assumptions are just wild speculations about a probe that has barely landed.

[Chainmail]

Use what math skills you have; the odds of that first living cell - that not only can ingest material around it to fuel itself, can use that energy to sustain itself, excrete its wastes AND can reproduce itself exactly using an RNA/DNA program built in to itself - are what?

Chances are, NASA just blew a huge wad of cash chasing its own tail.

[Kevmo]

[Kevmo]

Coppedge calculated the probability of a single polypeptide forming into an amino acid at 10^-23. You need hundreds of thousands of these for a single cell organism. So the probability of life forming by chance here on earth was on the order of 10^-trillion-trillion-trillion.

There may be billions of life-capable planets but that just shaves off 9 orders of magnitude off the probability.

[Chainmail]

Which makes one wonder - why is NASA expending so much money to "find evidence" of life? Why is this important to them?

Any engineer can tell them that nothing that functions well is accidental.

[Kevmo]

It’s all about money and politics.

Analogy
You pay me a $million / year to roll the dice once a year. If I hit on that 10^-trillion-trillion blowout. Then I have to pay you a $trillion. That’s like saying out of all the atoms in our galaxy, I end up landing on the one atom you selected. Would you take that bet? Sure as shiite. In the meantime I’m running my own $million/year agenda.